some weeks ago some of the singapore grad students went for a drink to celebrate someone's birthday and i saw them from across the street when i was coming back home with the english department first years and thought to myself that this place is quite overrun with singaporeans from one school. because without even trying i have met five other singaporeans at the graduate orientation and it's hard not to see that even at the graduate level the raffles machine is still at work. and after the wall street journal article about "ivy league machine" if it hadn't before the raffles name will not now cease to mean something for those in educational circles. so all the same, thinking of conventional choices, i almost regret that, especially at this time, people see only the list of raffles and raffles and after that harvard and immediately assume that i'm one who has got things right all my life, "one of those lah" i heard a teacher say, not cattily, and certainly not without implied commendation, but that is precisely what i'm not. i don't have 10 A1s at the O's and 4As and 2 S papers. i have been wilful and lazy and perhaps have got more things wrong than most at all the times i should not have. look at that 382 debacle that had cost me highest honours, case in point! oh i've never gone seriously wrong, of course, but even now i am still the one who plays the fool and can never be motivated or disciplined. and for this i am grateful to uva which is a place, i always think, would take chances with people who haven't always done it right. there was a singaporean who asked me the other day: if you are obviously smart enough to get into harvard, why did you go to uva? which question annoyed me to no end. and leaving aside the obvious prejudice of that question, one answer is, because without uva, i would not have become the scholar i am now, i would not have met the teachers and mentors who have helped shaped me - to become someone who could be here. in many ways, uva did help "make" me: it didn't give me something new - what it gave me was a chance. for it did take someone lazy and rebellious and who had done little right and who by right should not have got into any school and gave her all the opportunities and space and nurture she needed to be, without apology and with increasing joy, who she always was, and to be good at being that. it's true if they cut me open i'll probably bleed green black and white, but i'm sure there will be orange and blue platelets here and there.